Americans are living longer due to several medical advances, but unhealthy behavior and preventable illness threaten quality of life, according to United Health Foundation’s 2012 America’s Health Rankings®.

FAIR Health, the independent not-for-profit corporation dedicated to bringing transparency to healthcare costs and out-of-network reimbursement, has launched the FAIR Health Research Support Program, designed to provide academic researchers unprecedented access to its national healthcare claims database, the FAIR Health National Private Insurance Claims (FH NPICSM) Database.

“We expect the need for data to continue to grow as researchers realize the power of the information available to them through the FH NPIC Database and continue to ask important questions about the healthcare system.”

The FH NPIC Database currently includes more than 14 billion billed claims for medical and dental procedures performed since 2002 by healthcare providers nationwide. Data are submitted by more than 70 private payors participating in the organization’s data contribution program who collectively insure over 125 million covered lives, representing the most comprehensive private healthcare claims database available. Researchers will be able to license the FAIR Health data for research purposes. More information about the FH NPIC database and the Research Support Program generally is available at research.fairhealth.org.

This publication highlights the principal features of social security programs in more than 170 countries. Published in collaboration with the International Social Security Association, one of four regional volumes is issued every six months.

The true costs of ObamaCare continue to rise, as budget projections under the healthcare law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year, according to a new report from Cornell economist Richard Burkhauser and his colleagues from Cornell and Indiana University. This alarming revelation is due to official budget forecasts that neglect to account for employees’ spouses and children — which could result in hundreds of billions more in taxpayers’ dollars over the next 10 years. “The Congressional Budget Office has never done a cost-estimate of this [because] they were expressly told to do their modeling on single [person] coverage,” Burkhauser alleged. “A very large number of workers” will have access to federal subsidies, “dramatically increasing the cost” of ObamaCare.

The federal government wasted almost $48 billion in improper payments in Medicare last year, the most of any government program, federal officials testified Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report Thursday to coincide with a hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s panel on government efficiency. The report found that the Health and Human Services Department has been making progress in cutting back on improper payments, but has a long way to go.

Since 1990, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified the Medicare program as at risk for improper payments and fraud, and, since 2004, has issued 12 products documenting various program vulnerabilities. As noted by GAO and other public and private analysts, Medicare’s vulnerability to fraud and abuse arises from the program’s size, complexity, decentralization, and administrative requirements. Although a good estimate of the dollar amount lost to Medicare fraud and abuse is open to discussion, analysts agree that billions of dollars are lost. Administering the volume of claims (more than 4.5 million per work day) from Medicare’s many providers and suppliers (over 1 million) is a daunting task. Requirements to process and pay provider reimbursement claims quickly, have set up a “pay and chase” approach that complicates program integrity efforts.